French Florida: America's Origin Story (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798242786974)

Half a century before the Mayflower sailed Northeast Florida was the site of America's first effort for protestant exiles to form a colony to serve as a safe-haven.

While Catholic Spain's Tristán de Luna was battling the shifting sands and crushing hurricanes of the Gulf, a new threat emerged on the Atlantic horizon: a fleet of French Huguenots, seeking a "New Canaan" where they could worship in peace and plunder Spanish gold in secret.

From the foundations of Fort Caroline-a bastion of Protestant hope built on the labor of the sovereign Mocama ( a forerunner to the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock)-to the moonlight massacre of St. Augustine by French privateers, the struggle for Florida was a game of high-stakes geopolitical chess. It was an era defined by an "Unholy Alliance" with the Ottomans, a "Holy Crusade" led by the ruthless Spanish Avenger Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, and a land that refused to be conquered by either.